#All her anger and resentment is directed towards Jon but nothing toward Ned

[aangopologist]

Nothing can justify grown ass Catelyn beefing with a fourteen year old boy over something he had no control over

She should have directed that energy towards her cheating husband.

[thebluelemontree]

Is it right for fandom to frame the conflict as Catelyn's feelings versus Jon's safety? A child's safety is of course a priority, so framing it this means we can't consider what Catelyn is going through at all because what kind of monsters would prioritise an adult's feelings over a child's safety?

No, because framing every conflict as either/or and everyone picks a side is an unproductive conversation with no resolution or gain in understanding.  Some people in the fandom need to chill the fuck out.  Let’s remember that as much as we love Jon, he’s not a real person.  There are no actual abused children at stake here.  We can afford to take a step back and look at all the factors in play. Catelyn just doesn’t go around being terrible to everyone.  She isn’t a naturally cruel person.  Jon is her one sore spot that makes her irrationally paranoid.  Of course there is nothing right or okay about that; however, there are more complicated reasons for that than just the fact that he’s a bastard and she has a bastard prejudice. Understanding why something happened the way it did is not a failure of priorities or an attempt to justify Catelyn behavior toward Jon.  We can expand our scope to include:  

the pressure of fucked up social norms that places a humiliating neon flashing sign over Ned’s infidelity and teaches people to view Jon as having corruption in his “black blood.”

Ned’s overreactive mishandling of Catelyn’s initial attempt to be understanding about the whole thing.  How the patriarchy allows him to get away with this and how Catelyn is obligated to submit to her husband even when he’s wronging her.  This is a crucial event because Catelyn didn’t start out being irrationally paranoid about Jon.  Shocked and disconcerted, yes, but she tried to deal with the situation in a mature, sensitive way, open to being understanding about his reasons so she could at least move forward with the air clear.  Ned’s violent shutdown was where those seeds of fervent resentment toward Jon personally really sown.        

Ned using his authority to thereafter make Jon’s mother a taboo subject and a crime for which the penalty is catching the lord’s wrath.  So Catelyn wasn’t the only one creating a climate of tension and suspicion around Jon. 

Ned’s enforced silence keeping everyone in a state of confusion, misunderstanding, and shame that leads BOTH Jon and Catelyn to fill in the blanks with their most fearful assumptions.  That’s another thing too. Ned’s refusal to tell Jon anything about his mother is psychological abuse.  It fills Jon with a deep sense of shame and guilt about his existence because he believes he is the embodiment of the ONE stain on Ned Stark’s unimpeachable honor.

Ned’s failure to use his authority to intervene on Jon’s behalf so that he is treated with basic human decency and respect by Catelyn.

That the intentions behind Ned’s continued lying and withholding of information are not entirely noble or for Jon’s greater good, especially as years go by.  Ned, being a flawed human, doesn’t want to have that hard conversation where he has to confess to his beloved wife that he lied to her, put her through a hell that made her feel like she was never going to measure up to this other woman, and face her potentially relationship-ending anger and hurt.  It makes him look like a complete asshole, so his continued silence and avoidance is a way to control Catelyn’s perception of him and the truth.  Same goes for Jon. 

And all those things feed into the dynamic between Catelyn and Jon because as I stated before Catelyn and Ned’s marital history is intrinsically related to that dynamic.  There’s a lot to tease apart, and I don’t believe they can be treated as entirely separate issues.  Finding empathy for certain aspects of Catelyn’s position and perspective does not mean anyone is taking any empathy away from Jon or wrongly prioritizing Catelyn’s feelings at the expense of Jon’s safety.  Empathy is not a finite resource that must be allocated to a single, totally innocent party.  As a fandom, it would be nice if we just took it as a given that most of us are decent people that are aware that all forms of child abuse are wrong and that we do hold abusers 100% accountable for their decision to abuse.  I mean, unless we’re dealing with some fruitcake that states explicitly that Catelyn was justified in treating Jon that way.  But that opinion isn’t the norm and can be simply ignored as stupid.  So while Catelyn is 100% responsible for her decision to abuse Jon, we can still acknowledge how she arrived at harboring these intense anxieties about him that are motivating her actions.  Because Catelyn is not normally a cruel, unempathetic, or irrational person.  We established she can be very level-headed, calm, and understanding most of the time.  She massively fails in this one specific area and we should want to know why.  And it isn’t fair to hold Ned, the other adult character who had a direct hand in the situation, to a significantly lower threshold of responsibility.  They deserve an equal measure of criticism as well as understanding.        

The subject of child abuse is very triggering, and of course, our empathy goes out to Jon first and foremost.  As it should.  He did absolutely nothing wrong.  None of this is his fault.  I take it as a given that most people who question extending any empathy and understanding at all to Catelyn are coming at it from a well-meaning place.  Child abuse in real life is appalling, and our gut reaction is to paint the abuser as an inhuman monster who isn’t worthy of any consideration.  I certainly don’t shed any tears for those people, and I have called DCF on some rotten parents before.  But again, Jon is not a real person in need of immediate protection by real people.  His abuse is fictional and there are no real stakes here.  We can take our time to get at what Martin is trying to say with fundamentally good and decent characters who may sometimes betray their own nature by acting terrible for horrible reasons.  Seeking to understand a complicated issue like the tragic dynamics at WF is not akin to abuse apologism if it is handled with temperance and careful consideration.  We can still prioritize how we spread around our sympathies.  Prioritizing does not mean the top concern makes all other concerns irrelevant or invalid.  I do believe most people want to look at the characters fairly and want to have their first-reading assumptions challenged or expanded upon.   

What can escalate into nasty behavior and have a real negative impact on people is when some fans accuse other fans as being monstrous for empathizing with a character that they don’t like.  This is not coming from a well-meaning place and it happens way too damn often when they’ve spent too much time deep diving into the fandom without coming up for air.  Publically calling into question a fandom member’s morality is an attempt to discredit them and the conversation if it smells suspiciously of nuance and humanizing A Bad Person.  Framing any conflict as either/or or black and white means you have to pick and side and you are defined by that choice.  Sometimes people do this simply out of ignorance, limited perspective, and the desire to be viewed as a good person.  We’re unfortunately in an age where people (especially young people) are under pressure to project a spotlessly good and woke online persona because if you fuck up even a tiny bit, strangers on the internet are gonna come for your blood.  That’s where things can take a very ironic turn where they become the morality police, interrogating and browbeating other people so they show the world what side they are on.  Over fictional characters ffs!  If you find yourself turning blue in the face over something, it might be time to come up for air.  Just sayin.